To Hendog on His 36th Birthday

A letter to me, from me

Are you there, Hendog?

It’s me, Hendog. At 4:30pm today (EST), you will turn thirty-six years old. Congratulations! You are older now than at any other point in your life which yes, is always mathematically true but somehow feels more significant when it comes with a digit change. It’s “just another day,” sure, but there’s a reason people celebrate birthdays! Don’t get semantic about it, it’s not attractive.

Of course, nothing is going to change at 4:30pm EST on the dot. You won’t suddenly sprout one more white hair on your chin, or on other parts of your body with hair. Your brain won’t suddenly download, ‘Matrix’-style, everything you need to know about natural wine or 401ks. Nope — life will continue as it has, not unfeeling but also detached from any sense of narrative you so often wish it had.¹ Would that Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” kicked in, as if by magic, at exactly 4:30pm, but you will just have to do this yourself, or ask a friend to do it for you.

You don’t love birthdays. Or anyway, that’s the line you’ve used these past few years, telling people you’re “not a birthday person!” when we ALL know — all fifty-six of us here, and probably everyone who’s ever spoken to you for more than five minutes — you LOVE centering yourself, and “don’t celebrate me” is a gesture of self-preservation, the hollow words of someone feeling some kind of way and loathe to genuinely explore it.

So what are you actually feeling on this, your 36th birthday?

1. You wish you were further along in your career. You wish you had one, when it feels so completely stalled out at the moment and impossible to get started again

2. Did you just waste a whole-ass year of your life writing a hard-R Christmas comedy, with sex scenes, about a drag queen taking over for Santa?

3. It is perhaps time to think about an exciting managerial track at Barnes & Noble

4. You are now three years older than your parents when they had you, and there’s only so many times you can say “just gonna Clooney it” before that starts to sound hollow

5. Climate change/Ukraine/rampant homelessness/Coachella influencers/composting

Eleven years ago you turned 25 and THAT felt like a big one, somehow, rife with “quarter-life crisis” articles and a sense that you were older then than anyone had ever been on planet earth, or possibly any planet. In 2011 we were still using the Valencia filter on Instagram! Life was simple and knowable, on both a micro- and macro-scale.

Eleven years later, you — and probably everyone else on the planet — feel absolutely COWED by the sheer boundary-blurring enormity of… everything. In 2022, it all just feels so big and confusing and, even if you didn’t love ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (we get it, Daniels, dildos, you’re so WEIRD), the title resonates: it’s all happening now, all the time, with barely a chance to catch your breath. Hell, even something as simple as keeping up with new TV makes you want to start over as a yak herder in Reykjavik, or wherever people herd yaks. It makes you want to just “tend your garden,” which is the last line of ‘Candide’ and the only thing you remember from AP English in 2004.

…None of which is to say “how can you acknowledge your birthday when the Amazon is being deforested??”, an absolutely self-defeating exercise on a par with unhappy straight couples pre-2015, holding off on marriage “until their gay brothers and sisters are legally allowed to do the same.”

Nope, this is not about the slow death of our planet OR civil rights! It’s just about you, Henning, and your brain, which has long held, however unconsciously, the belief that you can only share things if you find a way to alchemize them into something entertaining, the die for which was cast when you were named “Best Entertainer” in Kindergarten and has stayed with you like the mummy’s curse ever since. It’s the reason you rarely write stuff like this² and largely just filter it through easier projects, like a 3000 word treatise on video game violence or a long-running series of snack reviews on Instagram Stories, where you play a character who just so happens to be named Henning. You are, at this point in your life, next-level good at masking earnest feeling behind the veil of performance! I mean, why do you think I’m writing a letter to you right fucking now?

So Hendog, I guess if I have a birthday message for your Old Millennial ass today, it’s this: just, umm, be yourself. And trust that when you’re being yourself (whichever “you” of the many Multiverse Hendogs in existence), good shit will follow. By which I mean money, success, and power.

Love ya lots,
Hendog

1. Obviously there is a reason you’re a writer!

2. which, you know, I hope it’s still entertaining